A.S.A. Harrison

“He’s definitely better now, more alive, ready to laugh even when they’re alone, more easy-going and relaxed, less of a worry, more like his old self, the way he was in the early years—although the days are gone when they used to get naked in bed to read the paper and watch the game and share a bowl of cornflakes, the milk carton balanced on the bedpost, sugar spilling out of the Domino bag under the sheets. Back then they had the freedom of knowing each other barely at all; they were in gleeful possession of a leisurely future with all the doors still open and all the promises still fully redeemable.”

- Excerpt from The Silent Wife, by A.S.A. Harrison

Bret Easton Ellis

“The girl I’m sitting next to at After Hours is sixteen and tan and tells me that it’s tragic that KROQ has a playlist. Blair’s sitting across from me and next to Trent, who is doing his Richard Blade impersonation for two young blonde girls. Rip comes over, after talking to the gay porno star who’s sitting at the bar with his girlfriend, and he whispers something in Blair’s ear and the two of them get up and leave. The girl, who is sitting next to me, is drunk and has her hand on my thigh and is now asking if The Whiskey burned down and I tell her yeah, sure, and Blair and Rip come back and sit down and they both seem insanely alert; Blair’s head moves back and forth quickly, staring at the dancers in the club; and Rip’s eyes dart from side to side, looking for the girl he came with. Blair picks up a crayon and starts to write something on the table. Rip spots the girl. Tall blonde boy comes over to her table and one of the girls sitting next to Trent jumps up and says, 'Teddy! I thought you were in a coma!' and Teddy explains that no he wasn’t in a coma, but that he did get his drivers license revoked for drunk driving on Pacific Coast Highway and Blair keeps drawing on the table and Teddy sits down. I think I see Julian here, leaving, and I get up from the table and go to the bar and then outside and it’s raining hard and I can hear Duran Duran from inside and a girl I don’t know passes by and says 'hi' and I nod and then go to the restroom and lock the door and stare at myself  in the mirror. People knock on the door and I lean against it, don’t do any of the coke, and cry for around five minutes and then I leave and walk back into the club and it’s dark and crowded and nobody can see that my face is all swollen and my eyes are red and I sit down next to the drunken blond girl and she and Blair are talking about SAT scores. Then Griffin comes in with this really beautiful blond girl and he flashes me a smile and the two of them go to the bar to talk to the gay porno star and his girlfriend. And somewhere along the line, Blair leaves with Rip or maybe with Trent, or maybe Rip leaves with Trent or maybe Rip leaves with the two blonde girls sitting next to Trent or maybe Blair leaves with the two blonde girls, and I end up dancing with this girl and she leans over to me and whispers that maybe we should go to her place. And we cross the crowded dance floor and she goes to the restroom and I wait at a table for her. Someone’s written 'help me' over and over in red crayon on the table in a childish scrawl and there are little curlicues on the e’s in 'me,' and phone numbers written around the twenty 'help me's and a lot of unreadable writing around the telephone numbers and the two red words stick out even more.”

- Excerpt from Less Than Zero, by Bret Easton Ellis

Iain Reid

“But isn’t being alone closer to the truest version of ourselves, when we’re not linked to another, not diluted by their presence and judgments? We form relationships with others, friends, family. That’s fine. Those relationships don’t bind the way love does. We can still have lovers, short-term. But only when alone can we focus on ourselves, know ourselves. How can we know ourselves without this solitude?”

- Excerpt from I'm Thinking of Ending Things, by Iain Reid

Mary Karr

"I loved the idea that looking at a painting or listening to a concerto could make you somehow 'transcend' the day-in, day-out bullshit that grinds you down: how in one instant of pure attention you could draw something inside that made you forever larger."

"Because it took so long for me to paste together what happened, I will leave that part of the story missing for a while. It went long unformed for me, and I want to keep it that way here. I don't mean to be coy. When the truth would be unbearable, the mind often just blanks it out. But some ghost of an event may stay in your head. Then, like the smudge of a bad word quickly wiped off a school blackboard, this ghost can call undue attention to itself by its very vagueness. You keep studying the dim shape of it, as if the original form will magically emerge. This blank spot in my past, then, spoke most loudly to me by being blank. It was a hole in my life that I both feared and kept coming back to because I couldn't quite fill it in."

- Excerpts from The Liars' Club, by Mary Karr

Marcel Proust

“With books, there is no forced sociability. If we pass the evening with those friends—books—it’s because we really want to. When we leave them, we do so with regret, and when we have left them, there are none of those thoughts that spoil friendship: ‘What did they think of us?’—‘Did we make a mistake and say something tactless?’—‘Did they like us?’—nor is there the anxiety of being forgotten because of displacement by someone else.”

- Excerpt from Marcel Proust's essay, “On Reading,” from 1905.